Taylor Berman

Early Wednesday morning, Hendrik Helmer woke with a terrible pain in his right ear. Helmer tried to suck out whatever was causing the ache with a vaccum cleaner. That only made the pain worse.

"When I stood up and it happened it would sort of hunch me over and drop me down to the ground," Helmer told the Australian Broadcasting Company. "I was hoping it wasn't a poisonous spider. I was hoping it didn't bite me."

The pain grew so severe that, eventually, his roommate's convinced him to go to the hospital. There, a doctor told Helmer she suspected a "little cockroach" was to blame.

In attempt to force the roach out, the doctor poured olive oil into Helmer's ear, but that just caused the roach to burrow deeper into his ear canal, where it eventually died.

"Near the 10 minute mark ... somewhere about there, he started to stop burrowing but he was still in the throes of death twitching," Helmer said.

Using tweezers, the doctor then pulled the roach from Helmer's ear.

"[The doctor] said, 'You know how I said a little cockroach, that may have been an underestimate'," he said.

"They said they had never pulled an insect this large out of someone's ear."